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Memoir of my Youth in Cuba
A Soldier in the Spanish Army during the Separatist War, 1895â"1898
By Josep Conangla, Joaquín Roy, D. J. Walker The University of Alabama Press
Copyright © 2017 Josep Conangla
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-9076-1
CHAPTER 1
From Cartagena to Sancti Spíritus
(December 14, 1895, to June 5, 1896)
In late 1894, before I registered in the lists for the quinta i.e., the annual drawing of names of those young men in each population who have reached the age of nineteen — a drawing conducted in order to determine the percentage of those who will be incorporated into obligatory military service (though redeemable with payment of 1,500 pesetas) — my father took out an insurance policy for 500 pesetasfrom the house of Mompó Hermanos y Cía, of Valencia, in order to free me from military service in the unlucky event that I were to draw a low number. The drawing, however, was favorable, giving me a high number equivalent to being classified in the reserve forces, which, for the moment, exempted me from military service. And as a consequence, the insurance policy from the insurer referred to above did not apply.
However, on February 24, 1895, the Grito de Baire sounded in Cuba, spreading the revolt for liberation throughout the island. The government of the disastrous Spanish monarchy immediately mobilized military contingents to send in successive expeditions against the Cuban patriots. By Royal Order the following April, the reserves from the previous drawing were called up and told to present themselves in their respective zones for enrollment in active service in order to cover the places that the first forces left vacant in the armed units of the Peninsula.
In the biographical evocation, El meu pare, que en cel sía, I described the difficult circumstances and the sacrifices that my family, as well as I, had to confront, because of the demands and disruptions of my being called up. As the result of all those circumstances — reviewed in the biographical sketch referred to above — on July 5, 1895, I had to proceed to the Recruitment Zone of Vilafranca del Penedès along with the other young men from Montblanc who were victims of the same fate.
Two days before I went to the Zone of Vilafranca, I visited the General of the Division in Barcelona, Don Lluís de Castellví, to inform him of my situation. He was a native, like myself, of Montblanc, and a friend of the family.
"You can choose," General Castellví said to me, "between the three contingents established in your zone: infantry, cavalry, and artillery." "General," I asked, "would it be possible for me to remain in an infantry unit in Barcelona so that I could continue with my university studies?"
"No," he said, "Catalan reserves for the three categories have not been designated for Barcelona. The only contingent of infantry that you can choose is in Cartagena."
"Well, in that case, I opt for Cartagena," I said to him.
Subsequently, thanks to a recommendation from General Castellví, not only I, but also other companions from Montblanc who had reported on July 5, 1895, to the Recruitment Zone of Vilafranca de Penedès, were assigned to the Regimiento de Infantería de España número 46, garrisoned in Cartagena. Along with other recruits we left for that city on a smoky and extremely uncomfortable train that traversed locales and landscapes in Tarragona, Valencia, Alicante, and Murcia, which at times were very attractive, but on the whole it was a tiring and disorienting trip until we reached Cartagena.
The occupants of each car on the train were organized into groups or sections. Due to my university affiliation, the captain in charge of the recruits named me the interim corporal of one of the groups. Based on the same qualification, but also because of the friendly recommendation that Lieutenant Juan Oller (a colleague of mine in high school in Tarragona) passed on to another lieutenant whose last name was Sierra, I was assigned to the offices of the regiment, a few days after arriving in Cartagena, and after receiving instruction in arms.
Within twenty days of joining the regiment in Cartagena, I felt ill. The upset caused by my change of life, due as much to the moral shocks of recent months as to the difficult adjustments to barracks discipline, led to a dangerous depression, which on doctor's orders, required me to enter the military hospital. But, thank God, I recovered due to proper medicines and two weeks of rest.
Learning of my promotion to colonel by a vote while I was still convalescing in the hospital also contributed to the restoration of my health. A colleague named Hermida, in charge of the small pedal press belonging to the regiment, communicated that agreeable surprise to me personally. Hermida handed me a printed Order of the Day in which my promotion was noted among those of others along with the no less surprising news that the distinctive honorific of Don had been placed before my name, an honor that was due me, according to what I was told, because I had graduated with a baccalaureate in Arts and Sciences and was beginning university studies.
Within five months of joining the Regimiento de Infantería de España número 46, the regiment received orders to organize an expeditionary battalion for Cuba. It is easy to imagine how that blow filled me with bitterness and how it caused my father and mother anguish as well, when they learned of the irreversible news. In the pages of the abovementioned biographical sketch of my progenitor I expressed the intimate distress that I, along with my family members, suffered because of that tragic turn of events — tragic for me, as it had to be for so many other unfortunate youths and their relatives subjected to the same anxious concerns.
The illusion we had fostered — that the War with Cuba would end quickly — did not come true. The tenacious and heroic resistance mounted by Cuban patriots against the Spanish Army was increasingly vigorous. And the inevitable had to happen in view of the arrogance and stubbornness of the monarchist oligarchies of that politically absurd state. Instead of liberal measures to harmonize — if it were still possible — the just aspirations of the revolutionaries with the objectives of the vainglorious metropolis, nothing occurred to the absolutist rulers in Madrid in their fatal obsession with saving the monarchy other than to send successive waves of thousands of men, believing that they would be able to drown in blood the entirely legitimate aims of the insurrectionists.
The Spanish government poured more than two hundred thousand soldiers into Cuba; with the most sarcastic disregard for the soldiers' lives since half of that number assuredly died in the island's maniguas [land covered with undergrowth], towns, and hospitals because of yellow fever — endemic at that time in the country to the further dishonor of the prevailing colonial madness — and because of dysentery brought on by bad food and military actions.
The strongest impressions Cartagena made on me, along with those of the anxious moments of the departure for Cuba, are fixed in three of my first books in Catalan: El meu pare, Elegía de la guerra and Eternal. As I described it in Elegía, embarking for Cuba in a disgusting, dirty, misery-filled steamship, the San Francisco, belonging to the Compañia Transatlántica Española, alarmed me no end. The horrible uncertainty as to the future, doubt that I would be able to return to the bosom of my family, the moral aversion that was already intensifying in my conscience in regard to the political crimes of the Spanish State; all that accumulation of anguished sentiments, of fervent tears, disappointments, and mental distress, began to turn my hair gray and profoundly embitter my life.
The embarkation took place at noon on November 23, 1895, from the port of Cartagena, the hot, walled city of barracks, hospitals, shipyards, and arsenals; the frivolous, very Spanish city where at every step you see soldiers of all ranks, groups of soldiers and corporals, boastful sergeants, assistants and orderlies carrying large baskets; the city of the Feria and of the Molinete, of classic cafés and resale stores; of churros and prickly pears, fried fish, and sandías sangrantes y tragantes ["blood-red, mouthwatering watermelons"].
On that day, as throughout the year, Cartagena was impregnated with the strong scent of spikenard; an evocative scent that for the five months of my stay in the area around Cartagena acted as a balsam for the spiritual tribulations that I experienced when I was torn away from my native land. But I absorbed that penetrating scent along with more disturbing effects when my battalion, which was mustered forcibly, came down from its quarters in the heights of the city, and headed through the streets toward the dock, amid balcony hangings and decorative colored fringes, sounds of music played out of tune, stupid yells, clapping, and deafening shouts.
In those horrible moments of extremely cruel uncertainty, upset by tragic anguish, without familiar arms to seal a good-bye with an embrace, without friendly hands to shake, behold that suddenly, unexpectedly, a young unknown woman who was sobbing — perhaps because the obvious sadness on my face inspired pity — approached me and handed me a spikenard; and trembling from profound emotion that prevented me from expressing my gratitude, I accepted that flower and lifted it to my lips as I wept copious tears.
Moments later the embarkation began. I fixed the extremely vivid, exact, and sarcastic impression it made on me in one of the first pages of the book Elegía de la guerra, and I have reproduced it below, initially translated into Castilian from the original Catalan:
THE EMBARKATION
I hold the unforgettable picture
always vivid in my mind:
the milling crowds
encircling the entire port.
Sobbing farewells,
embraces and sweet kisses
half-uttered words,
cries, moans and laments;
faints, nervous crises,
promises and vows;
trembling hands, in search
of other hands for support ...
A multitude of men and women without measure;
and in sinister contrast.
the bloody Marcha de Cádiz,
speeches of empty deception,
decorated cassocks
that did not leave the dock;
blasts from the filthy ship
already steaming in the port;
and the clatter of the chains
amidst inconsolable farewells!
Everything passed. Hoarse, frenetic
cries erupted.
Then, only the silhouettes
ever dimmer
of handkerchiefs waving,
fluttered in the distance!
On December 11, 1895, after eighteen days of smoke-filled navigation, the old transatlantic ship entered the splendid Bay of Cienfuegos. We were captivated by the surprising calm of the tranquil waters of that spacious bay, the intense clarity of the blue firmament without clouds or even slight wisps of clouds, the gamut of green in the sun-drenched vegetation on the banks of the marvelous port. We were only distracted from admiring the scene before us when we heard the sharp blasts of several tugboats with flags flying that hastened to receive us and the hoarse braying of the sirens of the San Francisco itself mixing with the shouts, cheers, chatter, and uproar accompanying the military and maritime authorities and representatives from the garrison, along with the official commissions of integrismo in Cienfuegos.
When the uproar occasioned by ultra-Spanish patriotism calmed down, we expected that we would be taken ashore in Cienfuegos. But only the battalion commanders disembarked; meanwhile some demonstrators from the noisy tugboats boarded the San Francisco to offer us tobacco and small red and yellow flags. Later, at midafternoon, the commanders of the expedition and we soldiers were transferred to a singular boat propelled by two big side wheels: the Antinógenes Menéndez, which in short order took us to Tunas de Zaza, where we were made to camp in the outskirts of the village, near the railroad platform.
There we relieved ourselves of our rucksacks and had our first contacts with Cubans, especially with little boys from seven to ten who were selling a variety of sweets. The surprising and serene manner with which the child vendors proposed the purchase of those treats I found admirable. Some soldiers imprudently tried to make fun of the small vendors by deriding their wares or quibbling over the price despite their low cost. But the quick-witted kids with appropriate and precise explanations caught the attention and won the confidence of the recruits, who did not take long to give the small merchants their due respect, thanks to the readiness with which the kids offered and accredited their merchandise spread out on small boards, and for the reasons they gave to justify in technical terms the worth and irreducible prices of their articles.
The discovery of the mental and expressive capacity of those children confirmed my conviction that neither force of arms nor any recourse employed by tyranny would ever be able to quell the firm, independent decisions made by the Cuban people. A people such as this — I said to myself — whose children of seven to ten years of age already know how to conduct themselves with such positive revelations of will and character, as do these children of Tunas de Zaza, will inevitably know and be able, by means of well-justified ontological and patriotic reasoning, to free itself from any tyranny, the more so if it is a foreign tyranny.
Moreover, I asked myself: In the lands of the regressive Spanish state, would little boys the same age as the ones from Tunas de Zaza be able to conduct themselves with a governing serenity and capability equal to that of these children? And on reflection, the only answer I came up with, at least at that time, was: no.
At nightfall, after roll call, rations of a sort were distributed to the soldiers, with abundant quantities of a wine with a very high alcoholic content, surely intentional, thanks to which a good number of drinkers, embracing their rucksacks on the floor of the railway station platform, went to sleep. And the next morning, almost at midday, they put us in several cars used to transport horses or cows to take us to Sancti Spíritus. The engine was fueled not with coal but wood; and since there was not enough on board, the engineer had to stop twice to get more brush in the manigua on either side of the train. This posed a danger for the battalion and for a squad of guerrilleros who accompanied us — the only ones who would have had to respond to any possible attack against the raw recruits, for as yet we did not have weapons, pending arrival at Sancti Spíritus.
When it grew dark, exhausted by the discomfort of the journey, and still under the influence of the soporific effects of that alcoholic brew in Tunas, we were made to get off the train on the outskirts of Sancti Spíritus. Each man of us with his bundle on his back was taken to several stables or longsheds where we were lodged temporarily. But those structures were not empty. There were horses and mules intermingled in them, stomping and neighing — animals destined for the commanders and officers and for the mule service assigned to the battalion, which, on the next, day, as we were told, was to go out on operations.
It was there in those sheds — stables, in effect — little more than a meter from the rumps of the noisy and pestilential horses where we were obliged to spread our mats on the hard ground, with the very high risk that, if we managed to get to sleep, we would be kicked or at the very least, become the victims of repugnant but inevitable and copious evacuations of the restless animals.
It was difficult for me to go to sleep as much because of the immediate dangers as because of the subjective enormity of suspicions and uncertainties that obsessed me. I fought against giving voice to my inner turmoil, which I had to repress in order not to reveal it to my companions in misfortune, who were, for the most part, as anguished and fearful as I. And I asked myself:
"My God, what will become of me in this unknown land where fate has brought me, spoiling the brightest illusions of my youth? Will I be fortunate enough to continue tomorrow in the battalion offices as I was promised? Will the war end soon, will I be able to go home, to Barcelona, to my studies and concerns, or will they be buried beforehand in this very cemetery of Sancti Spíritus, as were those of my uncle José María Fontanilles, a commanding military doctor, thirty years ago and a victim of yellow fever?"
The following day, after distributing Mauser rifles and munitions to the soldiers, orders came down to prepare the battalion to leave Sancti Spíritus in order to relieve troops posted farther away, first of all in Fuerte Taguasco, and to join other units in operations. Immediately, as well, the commanders and officers designated in Cartagena to run the battalion offices joined the respective clases and soldiers from the original office with the object of accompanying us to the building that the military command had chosen in order to resume our sedentary tasks.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Memoir of my Youth in Cuba by Josep Conangla, Joaquín Roy, D. J. Walker. Copyright © 2017 Josep Conangla. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
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